- Changes in the Abundance of Grassland Species in Monocultures versus Mixtures and Their Relation to Biodiversity Effects. Monocultures are ok for productivity, but only initially.
- Agricultural soils, pesticides and microbial diversity. mRNA and high-throughput sequencing show that pesticides affect nitrification rates and soil microbe community structure. Brave new world indeed.
- Making Sense of Agrobiodiversity, Diet, and Intensification of Smallholder Family Farming in the Highland Andes of Ecuador. Want sustainable intensification? Look at the smaller enterprises.
- Genetic variation of barley germplasm from Turkey assessed by chloroplast microsatellite markers. Little genetic similarity between wild relative and landraces in same geographic area.
- A cytochrome P450 regulates a domestication trait in cultivated tomato. Single polymorphism controls fruit size.
- Blossoming Treasures of Biodiversiy. 42. Quinoa – is the United Nations’ featured crop of 2013 bad for biodiversity? It can be.
- From crossbreeding to biotechnology-facilitated improvement of banana and plantain. Quite some progress, despite few breeding programmes. Will it all go GE? Big temptation. I would have made more of the genebank collections, personally.
- Perspectives on the conservation of wild hybrids. There’s more to it than science. Tell that to the banana breeders.
- Revisiting protein heterozygosity in plants — nucleotide diversity in allozyme coding genes of conifer Pinus sylvestris. Those pre-DNA days weren’t a complete waste of time. That mean we can measure genetic erosion?
All you ever wanted to know about seed
A seed bank plans to store a barley seed lot as an active collection at 5°C. The initial viability is 99.5% and the collection has been dried to 10% moisture content. When will viability have fallen to the regeneration standard of 85%?
That comes from a little set of exercises that staff of Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank use on the training courses on seed handling and conservation that they frequently organize around the world. Time was when you had to slog through the maths to answer that question by hand. Want to try? Here’s the equation, go for it:
Nowadays, of course, there’s an app for that. Or at least a website, SID, Kew’s Seed Information Database. 1 Just click on Predict storage time, select Hordeum vulgare, enter storage temperature, equilibrium moisture content, initial viability and final viability, and click Calculate. Hopefully you got about 18 years. Easy, no?
Ok, smartypants, so now try this.
You are a forest extension officer working with communities in Burkina Faso to collect and plant Khaya senegalensis, a multipurpose tree species, with a seed oil content of 67%. Seeds are shed during the month of May at an eRH of around 50%. Average climatic conditions in the afternoon in May are 38°C and 40%RH. You use ambient drying during the afternoon to reduce eRH to 40% and then store seeds at ambient temperature (12 month average: 29°C) in large plastic drums. An initial germination test shows that viability is 99%. What will the viability be after 12 months storage under these conditions?
Reconnecting with an old amaranth
It was the US government shutdown, believe it or not, that prevented me posting this item sooner. I needed to link to a GRIN entry, and the website was down for the duration of the stalemate, and then other stuff came up. Anyway, here we go at last.
A few weeks ago we had a meeting in Ames, Iowa, which included a visit to USDA’s North Central Regional Plant Introduction Station and its genebank. The germplasm collections at Ames are not just in the form of seeds. There are some medicinal and ornamental shrubs and trees around in the fields, and of course if you go at the right time of year you can see a lot of regeneration taking place in pollination cages. There are also some demonstration plots scattered around, and the amaranth one turned out to have a special resonance on this occasion.
That’s because one of the accession involved, PI 482051, just happened to have been collected 30 years ago in Zimbabwe by my colleague Jane Toll, who was on the tour, and was very happy, as you can see from the photo, to be reunited with it. 2 David Brenner, the curator, swears it was just a coincidence…
Nibbles: Vilsack on ice, Genebank standards, Indigo, Sardinian food, Seeds of Time, Musa genome, Wild rice collecting, Palm oil, Markets
- Secretary of Agriculture tours Ft Collins genebank. With video goodness.
- Which genebank I’m sure follows the Genebank Standards for Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. With video goodness.
- Prince of Wales sows organic rice. In white suit. With video goodness.
- The story of indigo. No video, but lots of photos.
- Sardinian blood soup. No video, but one photo. Which is more than enough.
- Wanna watch Seeds of Time? Here’s where. Includes much on Svalbard, of course. And a bit on USDA wild potato collecting. I plead the fifth.
- So there’s a second banana genome? Thankfully no video.
- “We are only using the tip of the iceberg.” Rice genetic resources, that is. Could easily have had a video.
- Face palm oil.
- Photo essay on the bazaars of Central Asia.
‘Dead Souls’ in genebanks?
We have received this contribution from Theo van Hintum and Liesbeth de Groot of the Centre for Genetic Resources, The Netherlands (CGN). We very much welcome such submissions. Many thanks to Theo and Liesbeth.
CGN strives to promote the use of its plant genebank collections by collaborating with private breeding companies in the search for useful traits. It usually selects material, preferably from its own collection, and organises evaluation trials in consultation with, and funded by, these companies. In this context, CGN recently searched for additional material of a wild leek (Allium ampeloprasum), the most important member of the primary genepool of leek, in order to identify resistance against two fungal diseases, as well as insect tolerance. CGN only has nine accessions of this species, and for the evaluation we aimed at about twenty.
The search in EURISCO for A. ampeloprasum germplasm resulted in a list of 52 accessions from 7 genebanks, and GRIN showed an additional 12 accessions from the USDA network. Most of the accessions of the USDA network came up as unavailable in GRIN; only 2 out of the 12 were available for distribution. In Europe, availability was even worse. The five collections holding more than two accessions were approached. Apart from the nine accessions from CGN itself, the other four collections, holding 40 accessions in total, could effectively provide CGN with only one accession. One collection did not respond to the email request despite repeated attempts, the others informed us that, due to the difficulty in regeneration of this species, no seed was available for distribution, one accession excepted.
The bottom line is that, apart from its own collection, from 52 reported and requested accessions in EURISCO and GRIN, only three were available for distribution. What does this mean for the overall availability of plant genetic resources from national collections. Are we maintaining a database of ‘Dead Souls’?